Michel Lamblin, Programme Director of INTERREG IVC, and Jean-Loup Drubigny, Head of URBACT Secretariat, were invited to present Interregional co-operation in the EUCohesion Policyto the mini-hearing at the EP Committee on Regional Development on 12 July 2011 in Brussels. Meeting was chaired by Danuta Hübner and was attended by more than 100 elected Parliament members, their substitutes or assistants.
Programme director Michel Lamblin gave an overview on the profile of the programme and achieved results, also demonstrated video about the MKW project where 12 EU regions work together wishing to improve their regional innovation capacity.
Learning from other regions' errors and successes
“Our goal is to improve regional development policies by learning from other regions, avoiding their errors and reproducing their success stories”, explained Lamblin. 1360 projects and 14 000 candidates responded to four calls. Matching more-experienced and less-experienced regions is a key factor to the INTERREG IVC success. 99% of the projects are involving communities from both competitiveness (54,8 %) and convergence (43,5 %) regions. 1100 “Best practices” have been registered so far and 29 already transferred within the first 41 projects. It is expected 200 operations to be successfully concluded over the programming period.
Members of the committee were interested in the presentation, had positive remarks and questions about the future of the programme and actions to be taken to meet a high demand of financing.
After the mini-hearing external guests and Parliament Members were invited to the cocktail reception which was organized by INTERREG IVC and URBACT programmes under the patronage of Marie-Therese Sanchez-Schmid and Danuta Hübner, members of the EP. During the welcoming speech Danuta Hübner expressed her personal support to territorial cooperation. She believes that in order to have strong knowledge based economy in the EU it is important to strengthen territorial cooperation which enables partners to learn from each other and transfer best practices which already exist in Europe.
MORE INFORMATION
- Presentation Video recording of the meeting (INTERREG IVC presentation from 11:01:40 till 11:24:30)
- Video about the MKW project
source: http://i4c.eu